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Finding Low Code…or Did It Find Me?

Ever run into one of those technologies that snags you immediately? That’s what Low Code recently did for me.

Mobile Apps are Beautiful and Pixel-perfect on OutSystems

As many regular readers will know, I’ve spent the last several years doing independent consulting and coding, mostly in the .NET and JavaScript world. And I was humming along, with the usual ups and downs that go with being independent, but mostly happy with what I was doing. Then a friend reached out, and mentioned that someone he’d worked with in the past was looking for someone with Microsoft stack architect skills, and would I be interested in talking with him?

I wasn’t looking for anything new. But I thought, can’t hurt to take a call, right? Which is how I was introduced to OutSystems. The initial call was encouraging, so I decided to take the OutSystems platform for a spin, and I was immediately impressed by just how fast I could build a fully-functional application, using just a visual approach of assembling UI and logic widgets, quickly creating and querying data entities, and rapidly publishing new versions in an agile manner.

Finding the Fun Again

My immediate reaction was that it reminded me of some of the best of what I fell in love with when I first started using Visual Basic back in the late ’90s. But without all the code, and with a much more robust publishing and administration infrastructure behind it.

I found that at every turn, from automatically inferring data types for attributes based on the names you give them, to rapidly creating basic list and detail pages by simply pulling a data entity onto a design surface, the tools provided by OutSystems made building apps faster and easier than I was used to…and dare I say it, more fun.

To make a long story short, I decided to continue pursuing the conversation with OutSystems. After a few more calls and interviews, I accepted a role as a Solution Architect. I’ve been in that role for about 6 months now, and nothing I’ve learned in that time has diminished my feeling that Low Code, particularly with OutSystems, is a game-changer for application development. I’ll be sharing more in the coming weeks and months on the whys and hows.

Can’t wait to see what Low Code is all about, and how it works in OutSystems? Check out the OutSystems 2-minute Overview below:

If you’re a passionate technologist, and this has sparked your interest…we’re hiring. Contact me, and I’d be happy to put you in touch with our great recruiting team!

One of the best things about cloud development today is the low cost of entry. With cloud vendors competing to bring customers to their offerings, there are strong incentives to keep prices low, particularly at the entry level. Microsoft’s Azure offerings are no exception. You can get started with Azure Web Apps, whether for hosting a blog or a more full-featured application, for free, if you’re willing to accept the limitations of the free plan.

One of those limitations is that the free offering for Azure App Service does not support the use of custom domains. So any site or app you host using the free plan must use a subdomain of the azurewebsites.net domain, such as myreallycoolsite.azurewebsites.net. For development and testing, or for hosting an API that will only be called programmatically, this is no big deal. But for public facing sites, you’re going to want a custom domain. Read on to learn how easy Microsoft has made that with Azure Web Apps.

I must have missed this while avoiding the interwebs around April Fool’s Day, but apparently Visual Studio Code is no longer beta/preview, and has hit their 1.0 version milestone.

UPDATE: I was confused when reading the update log, which had the 1.0.0 update listed as March 2016…this must’ve been referring to the preview 1.0 release. Thus the correction above. The official public 1.0 release was yesterday, so I didn’t miss it after all. Details below the fold…

Becoming a Speaker

As someone who’s been speaking on technical topics since the late 1990s, I can say with great confidence that there are huge benefits to sharing your knowledge at local code camps and user groups. And if you’re in the greater Washington, DC metro area, I want to encourage you to submit a talk for the Northern Virginia Code Camp, which is coming up on April 30th, 2016. Here are 5 reasons to speak you should consider: Continue reading Top 5 Reasons to Speak at NoVA Code Camp!

Wanted to share a quick solution to an issue I ran into while working on a Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app for my Raspberry Pi 2.

Background

I was building an app to read sensor data from a .NET Gadgeteer TempHumidity module using the GHI Electronics FEZ Cream, which is a HAT (Hardware Attached on Top) for the Raspberry Pi 2 that allows the use of Gadgeteer modules. In my case, I’m running Windows 10 IoT Core on my Pi 2, so that I can stick with programming in C#. The original driver included a call to Thread.Sleep, which it turns out is not available in a UWP app.

Just ran into an issue with some Web API and Angular 2 code I’ve been working on, and since there didn’t seem to be much info in the wild on the error I ran into, I figured I’d blog it, in case it might help someone else.

A Simple Demo of Web API and Angular 2?

Since I had the day off yesterday, I figured it might be a good day to jump in and start doing some work with Angular 2 (Hey, isn’t that what you do with your day off? Don’t judge!). Of course, I’d already run through a number of tutorials that dealt with hard-coded collections of data, so I figured it was time to build something that could retrieve data from an API. Continue reading Troubleshooting Web API and Angular 2 beta

The Best Laid Plans…

I’ve recently transitioned from working at home to working on-site at a client. The client did a great job of provisioning a nice desktop PC and large dual monitors. But one of the things I missed from my home office was my standing desk. To remedy this, I planned to bring in my laptop, set it up on a stand, and re-purpose one of the two monitors they provided so I could use Remote Desktop to connect to the desktop PC and still enjoy dual monitors…but there was a small wrinkle in my plan.

As I noted a few months ago, INETA North America is ceasing operations and wrapping up loose ends. As part of that wrap-up, the INETA board asked if I would be willing to help with community continuity through the website I created, Community Megaphone. The idea was for INETA to encourage folks on their mailing list to join a list I set up to discuss the future of Community Megaphone, and what kinds of features might help fill some of the gaps left behind by the end of INETA North America.

With this post, I’d also like to offer others in the developer community the same opportunity. You can join the mailing list, which is for the purpose of providing ongoing updates on the future plans for Community Megaphone. And if you don’t want to join a mailing list, but still want to provide feedback or ideas on features that would be useful for user group leaders, speakers, and attendees of developer community events, you can do so on the Community Megaphone Uservoice page, or the Feedback page on the Community Megaphone site.

I’m looking forward to the feedback of the community, and finding better ways to serve the developer community, and I hope you’ll share your feedback, too.

Node.js may not be the “new” hotness, but it’s still pretty hot, and getting hotter all the time. Whether you’re a .NET developer who’s still on the fence about JavaScript, or just haven’t gotten around to taking a look at Node, now is a pretty good time to do so, and in this post, I’ll show you a nice combination of tools that make learning Node easy and fun, namely nodeschool.io and the new Visual Studio Code editor.

What is Node.js?

On the off chance that you’ve found your way here, but don’t know what Node.js is, Node.js (sometimes referred to simply as Node) is an execution environment for JavaScript code, based on the V8 JavaScript runtime from Chrome. It’s designed to be fast, lightweight, and efficient. You can use node to write server applications in JavaScript, from real-time chat apps, to web APIs, to full web applications. While Node itself is pretty simple, with a [limited, but want another word] API set, it ships with NPM, the node package manager, which provides a fast and easy way to install packages, which are collections of functionality wrapped up in such a way as to make them easy to add to your Node projects. Node packages are available to facilitate all kinds of applications, including MVC-style routing engines, template engines, unit testing and more.